A single ~50MW facility dropping off the grid suddenly is something the grid can absorb fine.
The problem is with facility-level grid-responsive safety mechanisms. If the grid sags a bit and several DCs ~simultaneously disconnect, you have a problem. If the DCs going offline causes further instability that causes other facilities to disconnect or grid protection breakers to open, you have a cascading chain reaction
The loads are slowing down the generators that are burning a well metered amount of fuel to stay at 60Hz. This is a delicate balance since the phase angle must also be spot on.
If a generator and the local line disagree on f, phase or V, you have a short circuit.
If you lose a large amount of load, your generator will spin up with the excess fuel until the control system re-establishes the right amount of fuel.
But now your generators are out of sync! No worry, for small disturbances the dissipative losses sync everything up like syncros on a manual transmission.
But the disturance cant be too big!
Rotating machines are big and heavy, so the first line of defense is their inertia. But this is a finite (and precious) resource.
Contrary to belief, renewables, or generally speaking DC, makes things this stability problem worse. They generate large amounts of power while providing no inertia.
You'd think it isn't a big deal since the DC-AC converter can just synthesize whatever is needed. Heck just keep it rigid at 60 Hz with no phase change.
Well the later doesn't work - the rest of the grid is no longer at that phase and frequency so you got yourself a short.
Furthermore, the DC-AC converter, despite their manufacturers' promise, has no good way to establish what f and phase it should be at during a disturbance (and these magic codes are closed source, believe it or not)
Anywho, a large enough loss of load causes the grid to enters into unstable oscillations, causing protective relays to trip causing a zipper effect where the grid goes down.
Now restart will take a few days depending on the energy mix (fastest for hydro heavy)
Long story short - this is not a trivial problem, and the data-centers can't be allowed to just dump load willy nilly.
EDIT: made it clear that the grid killing disturbance is not caused by renewables; not exclusively anyway. Everyone has to play nice or the grid goes down.
Grid forming batteries and inverters are a thing. They can control the frequency on the grid. Just a matter of getting the right equipment.
The nice thing with data centers is that they are somewhat flexible. It's not a constant load. Data center operators can choose to reduce load. And if properly engineered, they could do so automatically based on signals from the grid.
The issue with outdated grids is that it relies on technology (spinning mass) that's at this point a century old. Which makes it brittle against outages like you describe. The solution is not more spinning mass but batteries and renewables to take the place of that spinning mass. A battery can respond to oscillations in milliseconds. If you then add flexible load that can spin up/down based on the amount of available power, you gain a lot of stability.
> The issue with outdated grids is that it relies on technology (spinning mass) that's at this point a century old. Which makes it brittle against outages like you describe. The solution is not more spinning mass but batteries and renewables to take the place of that spinning mass. A battery can respond to oscillations in milliseconds. If you then add flexible load that can spin up/down based on the amount of available power, you gain a lot of stability.
Why the spinning mass technology being "century old" (more like "millennia old" but anyways) is a problem somehow? The Newton's First Law didn't change much in the time that has passed.
Anyone who tried to "respond to oscillations in milliseconds" knows how hard that problem is because the force you apply is integrated twice before it takes effect. Try stabilizing a swing by pushing it's forward when it's behind the equilibrium point and pushing it backward when it's ahead of it. Now imagine a grid of swings connected by rubber bands and a distributed system of independent actors responding to oscillations. There are much more ways in which this system can diverge rather then converge.
Time may prove me wrong, but the arguments like "spinning mass is old therefore should be replaced" certainly won't.
> Newton's First Law didn't change much in the time that has passed.
No, but technology has moved on quite a bit. Heavy fly wheels are no longer the state of the art here.
A few tens of GW of battery capacity (i.e. a few dozen nuclear plants worth of capacity) that can switch on/off in milliseconds can do a lot for grid stability. That's part of the reason why grid operators are rolling out so much batteries. It's not necessarily about supplying energy for a very long time but about smoothing out peaks and dips in energy supply and demand and responding more or less in real time to that.
This stuff is basically being rolled out at industrial scale in a lot of places. Australia, China, etc. pretty much run increasingly on mostly renewables. This is no longer as speculative as it would have been ten years ago.
Yes, there are engineering challenges with rolling that stuff out in a lot of places. And even more policy and regulation challenges. Actually that is, by far, the #1 challenge in places like the US and Europe. Grid operators are simply structured and incentivized wrong to deal with this stuff efficiently. Texas is actually not doing too bad relative to e.g. California. But they clearly have some challenges still.
> A few tens of GW of battery capacity (i.e. a few dozen nuclear plants worth of capacity) that can switch on/off in milliseconds can do a lot for grid stability.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the problem.
Now, don't get me wrong, I believe flywheels are no longer involved but at one point they were for batteries and solar. Not to store energy, but rather to form the output voltage and to give the correct "inertia" of the waveform to maintain a correct phase with the grid. Prior, both batteries and solar were frequency followers. They'd look at the previous peaks and valleys to determine what their output voltage (or resistance) should be. If the input voltage fell too far, both solar and batteries would cut off to avoid damaging equipment on the grid. This is part of why the winter storm killed the texas grid (to my understanding) the voltage dipped too low which ultimately caused renewables to shut off completely to avoid damaging the grid. That all was somewhat of a cascading disaster.
Flywheels have been used as an inertia source to allow for both solar and batteries to act more like a hydro or fossil fuel generator. That's the grid forming technology. I believe (can someone verify?) that there are now all digital versions of this. But it's delicate software. Getting it wrong can do really bad things like destroying other generators or breaking expensive fuses.
Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.
Perhaps a bad analogy, but it seems these battery systems attempt to stabilize by "pushing", whereas spinning mass can also work through "dragging" the phase. So eventually, you will have just a few rotating masses setting the freq and phase, with more and more systems tracking that and pushing, which seems like a recipe for chaotic equilibrium.
No, they are doing that because they have a ten year head start on the rest of the world. The US & EU not having done their homework is entirely on them. The US is choosing to pump a lot of funding into fossil fuels instead. You could say that China is simply spending smarter.
The rest is just economics. We might suck at making batteries. But we suck even more at making new gas/coal plants or fueling those cost effectively.
Anyway, this stuff is being deployed by the hundreds of gwh per year now. Much of it in China but some non trivial amounts in places like Texas and California as well. As a result, the grid is actually getting more stable, not less stable.
> Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.
This is comically wrong. You're just making things up. Australia is at the forefront of this new tech due to necessity and some good luck. Scroll to the bottom of this article and have a look at the graph. It shows Australia has 5 times the grid forming battery infrastructure deployed or under construction than China or the US, or pretty much any other country. It is very much SOTA, needed for a grid that is a rapidly changing mix of rooftop solar, hydro, coal, gas and wind spread over a country the size of the continental US. Rotating masses are not going to cut it.
Infrastructure is an investment with an ROI. Fuel is an expense that delivers energy once and that is never recovered. The only relevant debate here is on how to finance the relative attractive investment for renewables and over how long it delivers that ROI.
That varies per region but this is a sector that is now about 2x the level of investment for fossil fuel related infrastructure. A lot of which is increasingly looking like the ROI might never happen.
10+ MW voltage-source converters that can't do up to around 80% of their nominal capacity as mostly-reactive apparent power with stabilizing synthetic inertia scaled as desired/specified are a mostly software issue, stemming from lack of regulatory pressure incentivizing the engineering complexity of that.
Though if you want to do a smoothing action on real power flux you'll have to colocate battery capacity with the converter.
Which to be clear is fairly cheap to do as long as you get compensated for the substantial frequency stabilization capacity this represents. I'm talking like 15~120 minutes at converter nominal AC power of battery capacity.
The first 10~20% of reactive power are almost free from the converter electronics, btw....
To add on to this overview, there are a new class of inverters in research called grid forming inverters which don't just follow the rest of the grid. One interesting technique is they can simulate the inertia of a traditional rotating machine/generator.
That’s a simplified and somewhat outdated version, there’s a huge range of technology to mitigate each of these issues but infrastructure generally isn’t free. A turbine does provides inertia for free where you need to pay for a flywheel or battery system.
In the end a renewable heavy grid can be extremely resilient due to all the batteries, but smart battery systems need to be incentivize or mandated because ‘dumb’ batteries are cheaper.
The ELI5 version is you're arm-wrestling someone and they suddenly let their arm go limp, so your arm slams down on the table since you can't react that fast.
To build on this analogy, tug of war fits a bit better. Nothing dramatic happens if one person let go, but if half of one team just let loose at the same time without communication, bad things happen.
I think an even better example is what happened to the Tacoma Bridge. You have an oscillating frequency and phase that needs to be precisely tuned in order for everything to work well. If something is out of sync wrong, you can end up with higher peaks, lower valleys, or flatter locations which can ultimately cause catastrophic failure.
In the Tacoma example, the input frequency continued to add onto the bridges motion which ultimately caused it to destroy itself. In an electric grid, a misaligned phase can cause excessive spikes (imagine 480V when you expect 240V) or the generators to ultimately burn themselves out because 2 generators are fighting with each other, one trying to raise the voltage while another is trying to decrease the voltage. The really tricky thing is that load (particularly inductive or capacitive loads) look almost exactly like an unaligned generator.
Reminded me of this fun video of a guy spinning up a water turbine generator and getting it synchronized with to the grid the old-style needle phase meter, then connecting it successfully:
I interpreted from that EU grid post mortem that individual generators are coordinated using out of band comms channels that aren’t the power grid itself. Am I mistaken that they do this? Is it done there, but absent here?
Communication that detects the release and travels as close as possible to the speed of the natural signal in the rope, and is robust enough to recover without losing stability if the other team grabs the rope again while your "let go" signal is mid-flight.
One way to dampen this is to put a really strong guy on each side, with instructions to never let go of the rope. These are the flywheels of the grid.
As the article says, this is difficult and adds significantly to the cost. But it is very possible.
(It also adds significantly to the cost of spinning mass generators too. Delivering 250% of nominal current in a short circuit situation requires beefing up a lot of components).
Actually large data centers at least if done in a vaguely alirack style architecture, can do this with a decent fraction of their nominal power for very little hardware cost, as reactive power and real power add up via Pythagoras (`apparent=sqrt(real^2 + reactive^2)`) to the apparent power (rms voltage times rms current, which is what the 60Hz electronics and 60Hz transformers care about).
The first 10-ish % are nearly free.
And alirack style datacenters have large 3-phase converters between the grid and some 240 (nowadays often 350) V DC bus, with the battery banks directly (with just fuses and sometimes a little bit of balancing/nudging power (think 10% of battery power rating)) on the bus, and then the servers also directly consuming from that bus.
The large converters on the battery bus thus allow synthetically smoothing load transients to the grid using the batteries to smooth that power draw.
This has just minor additional wear on the batteries and a small power efficiency impact from hitting through the batteries, both of which are easily paid by anything market-rate of providing that grid service.
Because they already need the power electronics and batteries anyways, unlike a utility battery farm that at best can argue day/night load shifting of solar production as the reason for the electronics and batteries to exist.
In that same spirit it's also effective to put batteries on the DC bus (between MPPT and inverters) of large solar farms, because they need the electronics anyways and it's actually reducing the required inverter&transformer capacity of the solar farm by peak-shaving.
Would demanding that large spikey users of energy like data centers implement some sort of demand ramping/isolation from the grid in the form of a massive capacitor bank or flywheel generator between them and the grid help reduce the risk here?
The data centres aren't inherently spikey, in general use their consumption is reasonably predictable.
However, if a DC detects that the _grid_ is wobbly (voltage or frequency deviations) the DC will disconnect without warning, and switch to its batteries and generators.
The grid complains because it's suddenly lost hundreds of MW of load. For the DC to have isolation capability, it would need a load-sink which can consume roughly the same power as the DC in normal operation, and can take in that load at a moment's notice.
It's a hard problem to solve, and probably better managed at grid-level than DC-level.
> The grid complains because it's suddenly lost hundreds of MW of load. For the DC to have isolation capability, it would need a load-sink which can consume roughly the same power as the DC in normal operation, and can take in that load at a moment's notice.
Thats why always have all the EVs be connected all the time (except the 20 mins they drive). EVs can provide demand as a service and take excess power whenever its available (instead of solar curtailment), and also provide an immediate source of load when events like this happen. Its a shame US is anti EV, it has the best systems at scale that can be leveraged to transform the entire energy ecosystem.
My intuition is that there would be a fairly stable base load, but doing something like switching on a new training run of a frontier model would be incredibly spiky, thousands of GPUs going from somewhat idle to 100% in seconds.
This is where a smart grid would really shine, because the utility could drop the electricity price to 0 or even negative and turn on 100,000 air conditioners/heaters to effectively give people free climate control to absorb the load imbalance.
So apparently grid forming or synthetic inertia can be provided electronically nowadays, but presumably it would not be too terrible to put a rotating mass in between the (e.g.) solar power source and the rest of the grid? So the electricity from the solar panels runs a motor that turns a generator. I suppose power is lost through friction and other inefficiencies, and you'd need to co-locate the solar panels into a big enough farm.
Some of us in Texas are all too familiar with the problem of balancing load with generation, the risk of a cascade failure causing a slow restart.
During winter storm Uri, they did a duty cycle where we only had power available for ~6-12 hours at a time on the days it was available. This was apparently to avoid that very problem.
So far as I know, the obvious mitigations like winterizing NG generation and/or peering with neighbor grids have not been performed.
I've often thought that the target* grid phase should be encoded into a high frequency signal, say at 50kHz. Generators without inertia can immediately switch to the required phase and inertial systems can work towards it or disconnect their outputs if they stray too far.
The problem in my mind is that, as it stands, the signal that everyone has to latch on to is itself affected by load and by different generators latching on with different time constants in a complicated feedback loop. Would having a single authoritative source be an improvement? Would that be a way to eliminate the need for inertia?
*I suppose the "target" phase would probably be based primarily on the output from the biggest inertial systems and take into account their ability to adjust phase and frequency.
Short circuit is when two sources try to drive the same node in a circuit at different voltages or frequencies. In an idealized circuit (such as where the wires are assumed to have zero resistance), current flow from one source to the other is infinite. In a real circuit, current flow rises to a level where "something has to give." This could include heating the wires between the sources or tripping some kind of protection mechanism.
I'm not great with analogies, but imagine a train with two locomotives, and each one is set to run at a different speed. There will probably be a lot of screeching of wheels etc. To make multiple locomotives work on a single train requires engineering them to be synchronized with one another.
Synthetic inertia has come a long way. An inverter knows just as well as a rotating generator what frequency and phase it should be generating, because it can mimic exactly the ideal equations of motion of a rotating generator with programmable inertia.
If you're large enough your connection to the grid is a negotiation with an engineering team.
The utility will force you to put equipment to correct for power factor (massive capacitor bank), resistive load, etc.
The utility also charges commercial users for apparent power (includes reactive power, or that sloshes around setting up a steady state), as opposed to just real power charged to residential users.
EDIT: in case your wondering, yes resistor loads is just glorified bunch of short circuits and a fan.
With the obligatory, must see, BBC Britain from Above segment in which Andrew Marr fly on the wall narrates the most challenging part of a live load engineer (UK)'s day ... <doof, doof, doof> the East Enders kettle break.
Pretty much. Except the law of large numbers breaks down in correlated events.
Like a black out.
What really hurts is are all the rotating machines, especially the one-phase ones (fridge, AC, blower). Those have transients that last several cycles and are electrical shorts until the back emf is setup.
Utilities will try to roll the power back on in sections to avoid instability, starting with hospitals and those near hydro plants.
But you can help put by turning off your stuff during the blackout and when the light come back on walking around the house to turn them back on.
Large projects will have a large load interconnection tariff that’s supposed to shoulder the costs of upgrading the infrastructure to support these new projects.
Data center discussions are weird right now because people assume these things don’t exist and propose them as solutions. They already exist.
The problem in the article is something different: The sites they’re talking about are designed to disconnect from the grid and use backup power when the voltage drops, which can be a problem because now there’s too much energy being supplied to the grid and not enough load to absorb it.
When voltage is dropping (or phase is falling out of alignment) don't you want to shed load to stabilize? The issue seems to be more that too much load could shed too quickly causing wild oscillations in grid conditions from an undervolt to an overvolt. Seems like the correct, and not terribly complicated, solution to this is to have a process whereby the grid operator can request large customers to shed load and move to backup power temporarily.
That seems like such a reasonable suggestion that I would be shocked if such a thing does not already exist and is simply just not reactive enough and too manual.
Interesting when you start to take this insight seriously. You could imagine data centers becoming important military targets in the future if the US ever balkanizes. Beyond that, securing compute could become a part of everyday trade agreements.
As things industrialize further, a state's net compute flow might become a topic of campaign promises. We may later find correlations between states' access to quality compute and the educational/financial outcome of younger generations.
To be sure, my leverage and inertia with a $200/mo ChatGPT Pro subscription is already a lot higher than it is without. We're not talking about just chatbots anymore, modern agentic models represent a quantifiable increase in individual agency. Whether or not the job market implodes, I am able to make progress on things even while asleep or busy with something else. This kind of agentic capital has never been available to the working class before at scale.
States like Texas, with their independent grid, might find themselves in a favorable position in such a balkanization event, but past events have proved that ERCOT is not ready to operate a statewide power grid. I was in Texas during the '21 cold snap and it was brutal. I was using my gas stove for heat. If resources for compute suddenly became constrained, and compute was deemed a matter of security and economic survival, it would be a cutthroat environment for operators of Texas' existing 400+ data centers.
Your math on the house seems off by a factor of 4? But 30% utilization seems high, as that would be a $2k/mo electric bill at 20 cents/kWh.
Reframing what you're saying, that would be a connection fee that worked out to just under 12 cents per kWh used for the first year, which seems both somewhat reasonable but also probably not going to move the needle much on the large deployments?
Yes, but using the 30% utilization factor I get 200A * 240V * 30% = 14.4kW , meaning a $14400 connection fee rather than $3600 ? $3600 would be a 7.5% utilization factor.
And yes, I got the one time fee aspect. My point is that if you're basing this off of expected utilization (rather than say the size of the service regardless of how much energy is used), and that expected utilization is roughly correct, then that one time fee can be thought of as amortized cost per unit energy over a specified amount of time. And that cost isn't even that high if amortized over a year.
Linear progression is unfair, just like for taxation. If you're going to make a law like this, it should be something like nlog(n) so that the big players that abuse the system pay more than the little guy.
We used to have something similar in France: solidarity tax on fortune (ISF), abolished by Macron at the height of the gilets jaunes movement in a big "fuck you" move.
Now it's much easier for wealthy elites to not pay taxes at all, as outlined in the past year with the Zucman tax debates (which elites opposed for daring to propose a 2% floor tax rate for those who don't pay 2%), and lately with the ministry of Finance Amélie de Montchalin lying to the members of parliament about the existence of a note produced by her own ministry showing that over 13000 millionaires pay effectively 0% income tax.
> It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.
I don’t find anything outrageous whatsoever about building out transmission to strengthen regional interconnections. Lord knows we are decades behind the curve on this. If AI datacenters are what finally lets us maybe start to get a tiny bit ahead of the game I’m all for it. When the bubble pops there will finally be a bit of pressure off, and perhaps we can get back to a tiny bit of overbuilt capacity to cover for exceptional events again. And more reasonable projects maybe won’t be sitting in a decade long interconnection queue.
At some point we get to all collectively pay for our parents lack of investment in energy infrastructure. We have been living off our (great?) grandparents investments into the future and wide scale deindustrialization of the economy since I’ve been alive. At some point you run out of inertia.
Could always move to Texas if you hate the idea of your state ever possibly spending a dollar that benefits someone across the border. They islanded their grid pretty much precisely due to this attitude.
Watching the PJM and MISO interconnections over the past decade or so has been illuminating. It’s been a very slow moving disaster in the making that nearly no one is paying attention to.
As for your proposed solution I doubt anyone - including the datacenter operators - would argue since that is largely what tends to happen as it is. Just change utilization factor to capacity factor and sounds good to me!
As a retail electricity customer, I vastly prefer whatever is going on in their operational context.
I live 10 miles from the "border" between ERCOT and MISO and I've got a lot of experience with both, particularly in disaster scenarios. ERCOT is a total shitshow when it comes to the edges. The fuel mix in MISO is pretty terrible for the environment, but it is also unbelievably reliable. The Mississippi River is not to be underestimated in its logistical impacts. The price of natural gas drives the daily fuel mix proportions, but it doesn't affect the available base capacity and its financial status (fully amortized for over a generation). If natural gas gets expensive in ercot and the wind isn't blowing, there isn't anything else to give. MISO has 2-3x the coal and nuclear capacity that ERCOT does.
No, because that doesn't go far enough and still shifts some costs onto everyone else.
Make the DCs themselves pay to play nice to work with the grid: BESS FFR/M-FFR, for generation capacity, and for transmission upgrades.
Right now, they're using privatized-deregulated communism to privatize the profits and socialize the costs. Everyone else shouldn't pay for these goddamn DCs.
Globally about 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture so less than a third of it will come back around, if it's exclusively for residential/commercial use you might do better but overall not a strategy that balances out
Not really the point. Should we have separate laws for stealing from grocery stores, electronics stores and drug stores because they have different characteristics?
It's exactly the point! Data Centers have a unique capability to damage property, society and the environment.
A new aluminum smelter, dirty as they are, wont double your electric bill and will employ far more people than a datacenter (other than ex-marines w/ shoot to kill orders, who works there?)
I'm in agreement with you on the jobs .. but power draw wise??
An aluminium smelter uses an immense amount of electricity, requiring about 14,000 kWh per metric ton of aluminium produced. Because it takes so much power—roughly equivalent to powering a mid-sized city like Nashville or Boston—electricity can make up to 40% of the total production cost.
That's quoted from a google AI summary query, sure - but I've had family members work the S.Australian smelters and they're beasts for power consumption.
My dad's first job as an ECE was getting power for an Al smelter. Im quite aware of Al smelters.
I chose it as an example because they're crazy power hungry. The other classical examples of high electrical use are NH3 fertilizer plants.
But! We're not building hundreds of Al smelters all across the country. Nor are we building hundreds of NH3 plants.
We should be, seeing how a significant amount of our Al and NH3 is locked in the ME, but alas; we've decided to keep a structural, supply-side inflation that will devastate any family making less than $400k rather than divert capital from the surveillance state and chat bots.
At most, there's a market for two Al and NH3 plants in the country potentially employing thousands of lower middle class folks.
Well, let's use discernment. Let's also add NH3 plants since those are also electricity hogs.
1. There's no VC distorted market building hundreds of them. At most two Al or NH3 will ever be built again in this country.
2. We need Al and NH3 in a way that we dont need data centers. Most of the protein in your body comes from synthetic NH3. Al has slashed CO2 emissions in industry.
There's a Middle Eastern fertilizer and Al crisis that's going to devastate our economies. Al and NH3 should have been on-shored 20 years ago.
3. Its already impossible to build NH3 or Al plants in NY due to other regulatory laws that target Al and NH3.
So, NY state in its (/s) infinite wisdom (/s) has realized that New Yorkers need to eat more than it needs to feed a surveillance state.
That clears things up. You want to use the cudgel of the state's power regarding zoning issues to address ventures which you find morally objectionable in some way.
Other than your sanctimonious tone, did you have a point?
And your sanctimonious attitude is wrong. This isn't about morality. It's literally about economic devastation being caused by VC's using the violence of the state to eminent domain houses to make right away for power lines, inctease power prices, etc.
Of course, you don't believe corporate socialism is wrong, you just call it free market capitalism. Well go read Rothbard.
I don't know why you want to argue about this here. Your proposed solution elsewhere of "How about an across the board $1/W hook up fee for new customers?" agrees with what I'm saying about having a neutral policy to handle new customers who impose externalities.
If you count the Soyuz leak, then the Boeing counts too! That was far more serious than anything you listed.
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
I think you're confusing me with the OP, which in fairness I didn't read.
Nothing in the Russian space program in the last few decades have been as dangerous as Boeings little fiasco. Yes, the modules have long term problems, but they're built by the Russians because they have the most experience in space living quarters.
Look at space mission fatalities, the least Soviet/Russian one was in 1971 and that includes the 90s.
Thats 55 years
The US since then has had two shuttle disintegrations, the latest in 2003 when the US gave up launching astronauts for a few decades.
Why are you commenting then if you don't even know what the topic of the conversation is? Just to distract from the issue with unrelated facts to defend mother Russia's image? Do you even realize how much like a propaganda troll account you sound?
You spewed BS about the Soyuz, which isn't part of the ISS.
Well if minor Soyuz problems are in play, I raise you two Shuttle disintegrations and a Boeing craft since the last fatal Soyuz accident in 1971.
You know instead of throwing "Russian troll darts" try practicing "strategic empathy", instead of letting your emotions blind you about engineering principles. Sone pointers:
- Space is hard.
- The Russians are good at it.
- So are we.
- The Russians are better at keeping people alive in space.
- We're better at sensors and materials.
- Historically Russian launches are cheaper (thats changed)
- Historically we've had money to launch more (that's changed)
Kindest Regards,
American materials engineer (guess who I work for)
